Ah, that was my issue. I was attempting to just change the user's avatar to a different *existing* avatar stored at a different reference number. Didn't have the parameter to actually send another new avatar up. Thanks, I'm on 2015.3.

Unfortunately you cannot do this with the Rest API. I had the same requirement. Which for those watching should be an option for the LDAP synchronization since if you are bringing over photos from an official source you just might want to do the same with the avatar which is actually seen on the site way more than the profile photo. Also with that option to be able to lock the changing of the profile photo since more than likely an official sync should not leave the user able to change the photo as it currently behaves.

I modified the com.jivesoftware.community.user.sync.DirectoryProfileSynchronizer to use the profile photo as an avatar as well. Currently I just have a quick resize to avatar size. Of course this requires an overlay or plugin type of deployment but pretty much every time I have a requirement that is the case.

The avatar manager is added so you have to override this definition in spring to add the avatarManagerImpl to this class so that it is properly injected. You'll notice at the top of the method that it is dependent on two system properties. One controls the deletion of avatars and photos since the requirement may be that a user can choose not to publish their "corporate" photo. In that case it will be removed and they will be left with a default photo. The other simply specifies if you are synching avatars or not.

This does not include other changes. For instance you will want to modify the UI to eliminate the primary photo drag and drop as well as reduce the profile to 1 uploaded photo instead of 10. In that case you might want to change the profile layout completely. Sorry I don't have those things separately to share but they are needed since you want to control a single photo from the LDAP sync instead of having so many per user which I always thought was kinda un-necessary fluff anyway...seriously I don't want to scroll through your 10 profile photos :-p